Back in the funk.
It’s a combination platter, as usual. Firstly, my sinuses have reinfected, giving me a lovely headache and corresponding general weakness, which serves as a fabulously rosy lens through which I can view the world. Meds on the way, just gotta wait it out. I hope.
Secondly, my kid’s got some problems. I’ve seen and read enough about troubled children (particularly in the writings of the great Rob Rummel-Hudson) to know that my son has a whole lot fewer obstacles in his way than many other unfortunate kids. And if there’s going to be trouble, I’ve previously said I’d rather it be physical than mental.
And physical it is. My son has muscle control problems that will require some physical therapy. Not just now, but for the rest of his life. For someone whose illnesses have already blazed through his allotment of paid time off, this just hit my brain at completely the wrong time. I had a very dark couple of hours just now, even firing off a desperate Somebody Help Me email to my mother. But oddly, upon reading my wife’s subsequent email to the extended family on the same subject, written in a can-do and somewhat flippant tone, I straightened up a bit.
We’re not dealing with Down’s Syndrome here. It’s just a muscle weakness, treated via exercise, which in a 2-year-old’s case is a whole lot of playing. Structured playing, but hardly boot camp. And he likes his therapist. Didn’t even want to leave after the evaluation.
As my mother has noted, I have my dad’s tendency to view the dark side of things first. Whereas one person might ooh and aah when they see a shiny piece of quartz lying on the ground, I immediately set about poking it with a stick, certain that it’s got a snake underneath.
I’m not completely crazy, because of course most things in life have a dark side. And in many instances it is the larger of the given sides. But not always. When I assume that it will be, I am doing the reverse of what the god-botherers do by finding the deity’s divine hand in everything. By searching for the devil in the details, I am assuming malice. Which, as an atheist, is a pretty damned stupid assumption.
Yes, it is theoretically possible that there can be a devil and not a god. But empirical evidence points to neither. The universe is not cruel, it is indifferent. This indifference can have positive or negative effects. And because it is indifferent, the types of effects do not necessarily balance out.
I gave up my brief foray into Buddhism a few years ago for a variety of reasons, some of which have been detailed here. One that I have not mentioned is karma. I know karma is more Hindu than Buddhist, but the two occasionally cross-pollinate, and those intersections are supremely irritating to me.
Karma is bollocks. It’s no surprise to hear an atheist say this, but it bears flogging. A whole lot of people who are for all intents and purposes non-theistic are still under the impression that old superstitions like astrology and karma hold sway even in the absence of the icky old dogmatic ideas they’ve eschewed in their personal journey towards enlightenment.
People: IT’S STILL SUPERSTITION.
Even Stevie Wonder worked this sort of doublethink, though in reverse order, claiming on the same album that “superstition ain’t the way” and “God has made us fall in love, it’s true.”
As discussed here previously, our minds are drawn to myth. Mine certainly is. But if we are to surpass our primate upbringings, we must step as much as possible outside of our brains and have a good poke at them now & then to see what crawls out. Thus I must remind myself that the universe cannot be a swamp of random chance and simultaneously be out to make my life miserable. It is one or the other, and the evidence pointing to supernatural malice is far from conclusive.
There are things in my life that are good. There are things that are bad. New good things happen, and new bad things happen. New things happen which are a mix of good and bad. But when I flinch under the whip of the invisible torturer, I am jumping at shadows. And a shadow, as Roberto Casati deftly notes, is an absence, not a thing.
So my son needs physical therapy. My car needs oil changes. My cat needs her litter box cleaned. These are facts, not dastardly schemes. We all have problems. If I can prevent myself from creating new ones out of thin air, that would be a very good thing indeed.